Deborah Cobb-Clark and Sherrie A. Kossoudji
Abstract
In 1986, Congress granted amnesty to approximately 1.7 million unauthorized immigrants who could demonstrate attachment to the US labor market and continuos US residence since 1982. Kossoudji and Cobb-Clark's paper looks at the determinants of wages for unauthorized and legal workers and how the determinants are affected by legalization. They show that there is a change in the determinants of wages of unauthorized workers before and after legalization, but that there is no similar change among a comparison group of legal workers. They find legal worker's wages grow faster than unauthorized workers early in their work lives. This growth has been attributed to job changing activity. The author's surmise that the inability of unauthorized workers to freely pursue job opportunities keeps their wage growth slower than that of legal workers initially and that it helps explain the change after legalization.